|
But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing
to penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a dullness to all
that calls us towards the primal and transcendent causes.
How comes it that the same surface causes produce different
results? There is moonshine, and one man steals and the other
does not: under the influence of exactly similar surroundings one
man falls sick and the other keeps well; an identical set of
operations makes one rich and leaves another poor. The
differences amongst us in manners, in characters, in success,
force us to go still further back.
Men therefore have never been able to rest at the surface causes.
One school postulates material principles, such as atoms; from
the movement, from the collisions and combinations of these, it
derives the existence and the mode of being of all particular
phenomena, supposing that all depends upon how these atoms are
agglomerated, how they act, how they are affected; our own
impulses and states, even, are supposed to be determined by these
principles.
Such teaching, then, obtrudes this compulsion, an atomic Anagke,
even upon Real Being. Substitute, for the atoms, any other
material entities as principles and the cause of all things, and
at once Real Being becomes servile to the determination set up by
them.
Others rise to the first-principle of all that exists and from it
derive all they tell of a cause penetrating all things, not
merely moving all but making each and everything; but they pose
this as a fate and a supremely dominating cause; not merely all
else that comes into being, but even our own thinking and
thoughts would spring from its movement, just as the several
members of an animal move not at their own choice but at the
dictation of the leading principle which animal life presupposes.
Yet another school fastens on the universal Circuit as embracing
all things and producing all by its motion and by the positions
and mutual aspect of the planets and fixed stars in whose power
of foretelling they find warrant for the belief that this Circuit
is the universal determinant.
Finally, there are those that dwell on the interconnection of the
causative forces and on their linked descent- every later
phenomenon following upon an earlier, one always leading back to
others by which it arose and without which it could not be, and
the latest always subservient to what went before them- but this
is obviously to bring in fate by another path. This school may be
fairly distinguished into two branches; a section which makes all
depend upon some one principle and a section which ignores such a
unity.
Of this last opinion we will have something to say, but for the
moment we will deal with the former, taking the others in their
turn.
|
|